The musician who perhaps inspired a profounder enthusiasm during his lifetime than any other ever did had been missed among men but a few years, when a little book was quietly laid upon his shrine, and he received, as it were, an apotheosis.  Half the world broke into acclaim over this outpouring of fervid worship.  But it was private acclaim, and not to be found in the newspapers.  To those who, like the most of us in America, vainly hunger and thirst after the sweets of sound, the book was an initiation into the very penetralia of music, we mounted and rested in that sphere from the distastes of too practical life, long afterwards we seemed to hear the immortal Song of which it spoke, and our souls were refreshed.  There followed this in a year—­inscribed to Mrs. Disraeli, as the other had been to that lady’s husband—­“Counterparts”:  a novel which, it is not too much to say, it is impossible for human hand to excel;—­superior to its predecessor, since that was but a memorial, while this was the elaboration of an Idea.  Here the real author ceased awhile.  Three succeeding books were but fancies wrought out, grafts, happy thoughts, very possibly enforced work; but there were no more spontaneous affairs of her own individuality, until the one entitled “Almost a Heroine.”  In this work, which treated of the possible perfection of marriage, the whole womanly nature of the writer asserted itself by virtue of the mere fact of humanity.  After this came a number of juvenile stories, some commonplace, others infiltrated with that subtile charm which breathes, with a single exception, through all her larger books like the perfume of an exotic.  Thus in the three novels mentioned we have all that can be had of Elizabeth Sheppard herself:  in the third, her theory of life; in the second, her aspirations and opinions; in the first, her passion.

The orphaned daughter of an English clergyman, and self-dependent, in 1853 she translated her name into French and published “Charles Auchester,”—­a book written at the age of sixteen.  That name of hers is not the most attractive in the tongue, but all must love it who love her; for, if any theory of transmission be true, does she not owe something of her own oneness with Nature, of her intimacy with its depths, of her love of fields and flowers and skies, to that ancestry who won the name as, like the princely Hebrew boy, they tended the flocks upon the hills, under sunlight and starlight and ill every wind that blew?  Never was there a more characteristic device than this signature of “E.  Berger”; and nobody learned anything by it.  At first it was presumed that some member of the house of Rothschild had experienced a softening of the brain to the extent implied by such effusion of genuine emotion, and it was rather gladly hailed as evidence of the weakness shared in common with ordinary mortals by that more than imperial family, the uncrowned potentates of the world,—­the subject and method of the